Hunting the wild hacker

Work should be play, says a new book that sets forth the emerging ethical code of free-software programmers.

By Andrew Leonard

Feb 5, 2001 | The systems administrator in the cube a few feet away from me is fidgeting more than usual. Finally he has to share his excitement. Right now, right this second, he's compiling the Linux 2.4 kernel. He grabbed the source code off the Net, and now he's building it, the first step in constructing a new, state-of-the-art Linux-based operating system for his desktop computer. And he's psyched -- Linux geeks have been waiting a long time for this new, improved, industrial-strength version of Linux. Its arrival is at least a year later than when Linus Torvalds first promised it, a fact that reporters and competitors have not been reluctant to point out.

The delay doesn't bother the sysadmin much, though. Software releases inevitably drag on, especially if the developers are trying to get things right, rather than just hurry out some half-assed, bug-ridden piece of junk in a brazen attempt to grab market share. What's important is that he has the code now, and he is dying to get it up and running.

What's the first thing he's going to try? I ask him. His fidgeting halts for a second as he freezes in indecision. It's almost as if he hasn't had time to think about what he's going to use the new kernel for. The immediate priority is just to get it to boot up. But seconds later, his face clears. He wants to see for himself whether it is true that the new version of Linux will be able to handle much larger file sizes than the old version. This has relevance to his work at Salon, where we are using FreeBSD instead of Linux in at least one key area that involves the manipulation of a massive file. If the new kernel works as advertised, he might be able to make a switch.

A geek playing with some new code, he's as happy as a kid in a candy store. A few minutes later, I hear him exclaim in wonderment at how fast the 2.4 kernel boots. Then, a few minutes after that, he looks grim, crestfallen. His favorite desktop graphical user interface, KDE, doesn't work on the new kernel. It's his first disappointment.

"They'll fix that soon enough," I say, and his face clears again. That's right. Even now, we both know, hordes of developers are testing the 2.4 kernel and upgrading their favorite software to work with it. They'll fix it the free-software/open-source way -- with constant incremental improvement. In the world of free software, stuff is always getting better, which makes for happy hackers. And this sysadmin is one happy hacker.

I'm not very covertly spying on him as he goes about his business, because at the same time as the sysadmin is compiling his new kernel, I'm reading a book called "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age." With a foreword by Torvalds and an afterword by Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen's "The Hacker Ethic" is a slender volume of musings on the value system of that new info-age breed of worker -- the code hacker. It seems useful to me to be able to match what I'm reading against the real thing -- kind of like comparing an encyclopedia article on musk oxen to the real thing in the wild.

Himanen's core thesis is that hackers have a new, improved relationship toward work. As opposed to those poor souls beholden to the famous Protestant ethic, outlined in Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," hackers don't treat work as a duty or "the most important thing in life." Instead, hackers make their work subservient to their life, feeling a sense of joy and passion in what they do, rather than responsibility for what they feel they should be doing.

The hacker ethic also reminds us, in the midst of all the curtailment of individual worth and freedom that goes on in the name of "work," that our life is here and now. Work is a part of our continuously ongoing life, in which there must be room for other passions, too. Reforming the forms of work is a matter not only of respecting the workers but of respecting human beings as human beings. Hackers do not subscribe to the adage "time is money" but rather to the adage "it's my life." And certainly this is now our life, which we must live fully, not a stripped beta version of it.

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